Did nonviolent resistance fail in Kosovo?
Aleksandar MarsavelskiUniversity of ZagrebFurtuna SheremetiKU LeuvenJohn BraithwaiteRegNetSchool of Regulation & Global Governance Australian National University
RegNet Research Papers
2016 No. 112
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AbstractA standard narrative is that nonviolence failed in Kosovo: the Milosevic regime was ended by a NATO bombing campaign. This essay exposes errors in this narrative. Nonviolent resistance inside Kosovo succeeded in unifying the Kosovar masses against the Milosevic regime. That solidarity was crucial to victory. A distinctive innovation of Kosovo’s nonviolence was that it built solidarity by decisively reducing violence. In particular, it reduced murders in blood feuds. Kosovo emerged from war with a comparatively low rate of violence for a post-conflict, post-communist society with a large organized crime problem. We contrast Kosovo with post-conflict societies where more people are killed by criminal violence after their peace agreement than were killed in the war. Learning to reconcile blood feuds restoratively as part of Kosovo’s nonviolent campaign for freedom contributed to this accomplishment. Nonviolent resistance campaigns can be evaluated through a criminological lens whereby averting war is just one means to reducing death rates from intentional violence.
Keywordsnonviolent resistance, peacebuilding, Syria, Kosovo, blood feuds
Citation This paper can be cited as:
Marsavelski, Aleksandar, Furtuna Sheremeti and John Braithwaite 2016. ‘Did nonviolent resistance fail in Kosovo’. RegNet Research Paper, No. 112, School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet).
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Did nonviolent resistance fail in Kosovo?
Aleksandar Marsavelski, University of Zagreb, Furtuna Sheremeti, KU Leuven & John Braithwaite, School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet),
Australian National University
Kosovo and Syria: Learning from repeated errors
The structure of this article is first to put our Kosovo research on crime and war in a broader context
of learning lessons about taking nonviolent resistance seriously. The next sections of the article
document the history of nonviolent resistance in Kosovo, including the campaign against blood feuds.
That campaign reduces homicide both pre- and post-war. Nonviolent resistance in Kosovo might have
been given the chance to prevent war. But our main conclusion in the quantitative analysis that
follows is that even as it failed to do so, it succeeded in reducing violence by reducing crime.
Kosovo in 1999 and Syria today both seem cases of failed nonviolence. When the wave of unrest
spread across the Arab world in 2011, the democratic movement on the streets of Syria was
determined in its nonviolence, more committed to resist picking up guns than in most Arab Spring
uprisings. Likewise Kosovo had an unusually vibrant nonviolent resistance to Serbian domination in
the 1980s and 1990s. In both cases, when external powers opted for armed conflict—Milosevic and
NATO in Kosovo—ISIS, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, the US, Russia, Iran and more in Syria—it became
maximally difficult for nonviolence to succeed. In Syria, as in Kosovo, nonviolent resistance to tyranny
received limited international funding, while armed fighters against Assad won cash and recruits
aplenty (as did Assad to repel them).
Hence we consider a new frame in this article. When a country is caught in a multiplex regional
cascade of violence, it is hard for nonviolence to prevail (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2017). The
nonviolent resistance of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), led by Ibrahim Rugova, sought
support from Croatia to resist Serbian domination. But Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, and also
Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, pressed Kosovo to open another armed front against Serbia.
This is one implication of cascades of violence analysis. Once a regional cascade of war is on the
march, there will always be interests that seek to persuade a switch from nonviolent struggle against
a shared enemy to a new front of their armed struggle against that enemy.
What had been needed was for the US, the EU and Russia to work in concert to restrain leaders like
Tudjman from provoking Milosevic, and then to restrain Milosevic. Interposition of NATO and Russian
troops between Serbia and Croatia to prevent the first dreadful cascade toward total war in
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Yugoslavia was the needed intervention. Ultimately this kind of NATO and Russian peace
enforcement deployment did happen in Kosovo. Moreover, another subsequent UN peacekeeping
deployment prevented a further cascade of war from Kosovo to Macedonia. So what seemed difficult
in 1989 became an imperative from 1999. As UN and US diplomat David Phillips (2012: 348) put it:
‘The UN Preventive Deployment in Macedonia (UNPREDEP) was a model for preventive diplomacy.’
Had the great powers behaved differently, might nonviolence have worked in allowing a peaceful
transition to separation of Kosovo and Serbia, as with the Czech and Slovak Republics, and indeed
the separation of Slovenia from Yugoslavia before total war broke out in Croatia and Bosnia. A less
terrible outcome for the people of Syria likewise might have been achieved by joint NATO, Russian
and regional diplomacy to put narrowly conceived interests aside to prevent a civil war. A peaceful
outcome was possible through joint NATO, Russian and regional resolve in 2011 to persuade Assad
and the Free Syrian Army that the great powers stood ready to put their troops at risk as
peacekeepers in order to prevent war.
Counterfactual social science has an important role to play if we hope to improve at diagnosing the
lessons to be learnt from such paths not taken (Weber 1949; Lewis 1973; Climo and Howells 1976;
Fearton 1991; Ferguson 2011). This essay asks a counterfactual question that intertwines with the
war prevention counterfactuals we have just discussed. Had the nonviolent resistance campaigns in
Kosovo in the 1990s never been launched would Kosovo have been better or worse off? Did
nonviolent resistance simply prolong the suffering of the people of Kosovo by deferring the war that
was their only path to freedom? Did nonviolent resistance distract the Kosovar resistance from
focusing its energy on arming and training itself for an inevitable war?
This study answers these questions in the negative. It concludes that even though the nonviolent
resistance strategy was flawed, even though western support for it was even more flawed, more lives
would likely have been lost in Kosovo had the path of nonviolence not been attempted. This
conclusion flies in the face of a standard narrative: that nonviolence failed in Kosovo; conversely, war
worked, the NATO bombing worked, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) insurgency worked.
History of late 20th century nonviolent resistance
1968 was a watershed year of bottom-up resistance to oppression around the world, including in
Kosovo. Protestors marched the streets of Prishtina on 27 November objecting to the ‘colonial’
oppression of Kosovo, chanting ‘We want a university’. The police crushed it brutally, though only
one demonstrator was killed. The next large protest did not come until March 1981 at the University of
Prishtina, which had been established by then. More protests followed in the weeks after the initial
spark, and unknown but large numbers, perhaps even 1000 (Malcolm 1998: 335), of the protestors
were killed. 1988 saw huge protests again after Milosevic started moves to dismantle Kosovo’s
autonomy within Yugoslavia. Trepça miners went on strike and marched to Prishtina to be joined by
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factory workers and students, 100,000 in total. Throughout Kosovo perhaps 300,000 joined multiple
marches (Clark 2000: 48). The confrontation escalated in February 1989, when 1200 miners locked
themselves deep in shafts to disrupt production; thousands of other workers occupied other mines. At
this point, the nonviolent resistance was proactive, creative and imposing real political and economic
costs on Milosevic, forcing him to make political concessions to the miners, on which he subsequently
reneged.
The political cost of Milosevic’s 1989 revocation of the autonomy of Kosovo was enormous: this was
the domino that caused the rest to fall and disintegrate Yugoslavia. In September 1990, Kosovo
enacted its first independent Constitution, also known as Kaçanik’s Constitution (Kushtetuta e
Kaçanikut) (Bajrami 2011: 60). After this, in September 1991 – the referendum for Kosovo as an
independent and sovereign state – was held successfully. In 1992 Kosovo-wide elections were held to
elect a parallel government. Ibrahim Rugova was elected after he was approached by the leadership
of the nonviolent resistance to become the head of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). Rugova
continued the execution of nonviolent principles with impressive commitment. Whenever a
demonstration occurred, LDK operatives would be on the street urging nonviolent discipline upon the
protestors so as not to provide a justification for state violence. Establishing parallel institutions in
health and education operating out of the homes of doctors, nurses, teachers and university lecturers
were major accomplishments. 19,000 teachers and professors taught 330,000 students in Kosovo’s
parallel education system (Clark 1999). The Mother Teresa Association established 91 clinics
attracting international humanitarian support.
The parallel parliament, however, was more symbolic than substantive. It did not meet (except
symbolically); it failed as a listening institution for Rugova’s leadership. Most importantly, the
leadership failed to respond to the dissatisfaction of the rank and file of the democracy movement,
particularly the students, that the resistance strategy was too passive, losing the momentum it
enjoyed between 1988 and 1992. The students were right in this critique. Convening the parliament in
the presence of the international media as a venue for condemnation of the regime and for robust
open debate on strategy would have posed a difficult dilemma for Milosevic. He would have had to
bear the political costs of allowing the parliament to condemn his regime, or the awful international
optics of forcibly closing the parallel democratic chamber.
It suited Milosevic to keep Rugova alive and out of prison because he was pacifying the nonviolent
resistance. Western diplomats tacitly supported the status quo as they did not want to spook
Milosevic from signing (and thereafter implementing) the Dayton Accord to secure peace in Bosnia.
Signs of western support for the next (Kosovar) domino to fall in the disintegration of Serbian control
over Yugoslavia indeed would have made Dayton a more difficult accomplishment. And Kosovo was
the most symbolically important domino in the eyes of Serb elites. We were able to interview some
members of Rugova’s inner circle. Even they agreed that Rugova allowed himself to be overly
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influenced by western diplomats to keep the resistance passive. For example, he sought to dissuade
the students from organising protests on the streets because this would provoke state violence.
Rugova was wise to internationalise his people’s struggle, yet became overly dependent on that very
international strategy. In addition, all major political movements in Kosovo failed to hedge with the
option of working with the nonviolent resistance to destabilise Milosevic inside Serbia. Fretilin in East
Timor at the same time was assuming a major leadership role in Jakarta in the democracy movement
to overthrow Indonesia’s Suharto. The Timorese students were the most courageous shock troops in
the nonviolent struggle for democracy on the streets of Jakarta. This was critical to the political genius
of the East Timorese struggle for liberation (Braithwaite, Charlesworth and Soares 2012). There was
only a tiny minority of Kosovo leaders, notably women, who advocated enhanced contacts with the
Serbian opposition when hundreds of thousands of Serbs surged onto the streets of Belgrade to
challenge Milosevic (Stephan 2006:74).
As a result of these errors, the nonviolent strategy ceased inflicting significant economic, political or
diplomatic costs on the Milosevic regime. When Rugova and Kosovo were excluded from discussion
at the US-brokered Dayton talks, popular frustration with the tame character of Rugova’s resistance
passed a tipping point. Armed resistance was the main alternative that quickly built mass support in
Kosovo after Dayton. Advocacy for an armed struggle, and funding of it, was particularly strong
among the Kosovo diaspora in western democracies. By 1996, the Kosovo Liberation Army launched
its first set of attacks in defense of Albanian villages of Kosovo.
The second turn away from the passive style of Rugova’s resistance was the energising of new active
resistance campaigns. After an Albanian student was shot by a Serb sniper in Prishtina in April 1996,
a women’s network mounted public protests in defiance of LDK orders. Then followed the major
University of Pristina Students’ Union surges onto the streets. These were also in defiance of LDK.
The student protests were successful as they spread mass participation to six cities. A heavy-handed
Serbian response attracted international media coverage, waves of sympathy and practical support
from civil society globally (Stephan 2006:74). The contrast between the nonviolence of the students
and the violence of the police extracted the first open condemnation of Serbian rule in Kosovo by the
leader of the Orthodox Church in Serbia, Patriarch Pavle.
This more proactive nonviolent movement did not have time to mature and spread, however, before it
was pushed aside by the chatter of guns, the whistling of NATO bombs. The domestic error of overly
passive nonviolent resistance was both caused and compounded by western diplomacy that only
responded when there was armed resistance in the former Yugoslavia. So we must ponder this
counterfactual: Had the west decided not to exclude Kosovar voices at Dayton, had it supported
rather than suppressed proactive nonviolent resistance to the Milosevic regime inside Kosovo, that
nonviolence might have liberated Kosovo Albanians peacefully and accelerated the nonviolent
liberation of the people of Serbia from Milosevic. Flawed western diplomacy reinforced the flawed
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conclusion that violence works in these situations. It undermined nonviolence that is only likely to
work when ethical diplomacy rallies around it.
The Dayton piece of the harsh evaluation of western diplomacy in this counterfactual is probably
overly harsh. At the time of Dayton it was critical to stem the bloodshed in Bosnia. It was perhaps
understandable that Dayton put aside blood that was already flowing in Croatia, and the risk of future
bloodshed in Kosovo, to prioritise the most massive violence du jour—Bosnia—and not frighten
Milosevic over Kosovo. Peace plans that had failed prior to Dayton—the Carrington-Cutileiro plan of
1992, Vance-Owen 1993, Owen-Stoltenberg 1993—were a context that justified modest ambitions as
opposed to a grand bargain for all Yugoslavia.
The long trajectory of Kosovar Albanian nonviolence
Albanian tradition places great importance on honour, in particular on men to avenge crimes against
their family. Blood feuds have been recorded that continued between two families for 80 years across
32 instances of revenge killing (Mangalakova 2004:11). Such practices were in line with the Code of
Lekë Dukagjini, the most influential customary law of Kosovo usually referred to as Lekë’s Kanun, or
simply as the Kanun . Lekë’s Kanun is a medieval blend of tribal and Old Testament doctrines; most
Kosovars did not become Muslims until quite late in the history of the Ottoman Empire. The Kanun
relies on families and tribes to enforce the law rather than the state. Indeed, Lekë’s Kanun specifically
resisted state authority in a variety of ways, even in the late Ottoman Empire. In laws passed by the
Banner of Kurbin under the Kanun in 1906 it was a crime to become a policeman and even a crime to
offer food to a policeman or allow policemen inside one’s house (Gjecov 1989: 256).
One point, however, is indisputable: for the clans of Northern Albania, the maxims of
the Kanun were primary, i.e. they took precedence over all other laws, and for that
reason both the church and the state opposed the application of the Kanun ... There
is no doubt that [the Kanun is] the fundamental customary law employed in the Middle
Ages in almost all of the areas of Albanian settlement (Camaj 1989:xiii).
Content of the Kanun
Honour (nderi) is just one of the four pillars of the Kanun, the others being hospitality (mikpritja), right
conduct (sjellja) and loyalty to one’s clan (fis). Undoubtedly, the most violent aspect of the Kanun is
that it institutionalises blood feuds by obliging killing a member of a family that has offended against
your family. At the same time, it institutionalises reconciliation in various interesting ways. Here are
some examples:
While the Kanun is an honour Code, it also honours the role of the mediator and
shames a dishonourable mediator: Ԥ1016. If it is discovered that an Elder has
pronounced judgement with partiality and against the Kanun, due to having been
corrupted by bribes from one of the litigants, aside from being dishonoured, he may
no longer be known as an Elder.’
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Like most medieval tribal (and in indeed many late modern) traditions, reconciliation is
led by male elders. Women and young people can, however, play important roles.
§669 of the Kanun states that ‘A mediator may be a man or a woman, a boy or a girl,
or even a priest.’
The Kanun provides for periods of truce following a murder to allow cooling down, and
guarantees the safety of mediators. During that truce, the murderer is required to
attend the funeral, accompany the body to the funeral and attend the wake (Kanun
CXXII: The Truce). The murderer is entitled to ask a well-respected mediator to
negotiate a besa—meaning generally a vow, in this case a vow that no one would
hurt him during the specified truce.
With us a man who has got a besa has got dignity. People should be reconciled, there
should be reconciliation. Lek Dukagjin says: ‘A bent head turns away wrath’ ... The
besa is the institution of last resort with Albanians (Kosova man quoted in
Mangalakova 2004: 12).
Traditionally the body of a murdered man would lie in his home for a number of days
to allow others to pay their respects and offer condolences to the family. Village
elders often required the murderer to sit beside the body, living with the family of the
man he murdered, with his safety guaranteed by that family during the period of
mourning. If ‘the hearts of the members of the family of the murderer and the family of
the victim have been reconciled, they drink some of each other’s blood (§988).
According to the kanun, reconciliation requires four steps: laying down of weapons,
opening of dialogue, finding a solution, and achieving forgiveness and reconciliation
... According to the kanun, the mediator (generally an older, well-respected male
member of the community) visits first the murderer’s and then the victim’s family to
hear each side of the feud ... Mediation processes are concluded with a traditional
‘blood meal’, during which both families share a meal in the offender’s home to
symbolise the reconciliation ... mediation does not assume the guilt of one party
because the long-lived nature of retaliatory blood feuds means that both parties have
been both victims and perpetrator (Pratt 2013: 7–8, 12).
All families have a ‘right to participate in the conferences of the village’ (§ 26) and the
head of the house has an obligation to participate in every village conference (§27).
As Suzanna Pratt (2013:1) put it:
the same social code justifying blood feuds also contains the foundations of a
restorative justice process ... The restorative features of traditional mediation have the
potential to lead to widespread reconciliation of blood feuds and alleviation of
continued cyclical violence in northern Albania.
Throughout history, Albanians used besa not just among themselves, but also to give their word of
honour to members of other ethnic groups. A good example, widely used as a proof of friendly
relations with the neighbouring Serbs in the past, are the so-called Monastery Dukes—Albanians
whose ancestors gave a besa to the Serbian monks to protect their monasteries in Kosovo from
potential attackers (including from Albanians themselves). The Kosovo Albanians had kept their besa
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for centuries—providing protection to several Serbian monasteries—including the medieval
headquarters of the Serbian Orthodox Church (Patriarchate of Peć)—from invaders, thieves and
robbers (Krasnici 1958; Karan 1985:48). The Church enjoyed protected status in the Kanun itself,
which regulated its protection in the opening paragraphs, prescribing the “duty to defend it when it
requires help” (§ 3). 1
In Kosovo today, a common view among legal and legislative elites is that independent Kosovo courts
render the Kanun redundant or of diminished importance.2 As one Member of Parliament put it:
Kosovar Albanian society stands between the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini and the state
based on the rule of law. We have never had our own state; Kosovo had autonomy,
had its own judicial system, but Albanians never accepted that as their own, and so
they had to follow their own law. It was law within the law, state within the state;
although the court might have sentenced someone to 15 years in prison on a murder
charge, the Kanun was much more powerful than the court. Now, little by little,
Albanian society has to embrace the idea of implementing our own judicial system.
There is a parliament in Kosovo, but UNMIK [the United Nations Mission in Kosovo]
functions as a Ministry of Justice. Kosovo is going to have its own Minister of Justice
and then Albanians will see they don’t need the Kanun (quoted in Mangalakova 2004:
11).
Despite the fact that the Kanun is mostly considered of diminished importance, there are still court
cases in Kosovo to this day when in verdicts the judges mention institutions of Kanun such as besa.
In one of the cases that we had the chance to see ourselves the judge refused release of a prisoner in
pre-trial detention on the ground that the family of the deceased had not granted him a besa.
Mangalakova (2004: 11) also quoted two Albanian women from Prizren who manifested what is
probably a more widespread view about contemporary relevance when they said: ‘Some parts of the
Kanun should be practised, but the negative things ought to be rejected’. Most commentators
conceive the influence of the Kanun in the twenty-first century as greater in rural areas, though many
commentators note significant continuity of urban influence, as in Voell’s (2003) ethnographic work
showing the Kanun to exist as ‘habitus’ in suburban Tirana, the capital of Albania.
1 This suggests that the 2004 attacks on Serbian churches and monasteries (Grujic 2014:78) have not been
rooted in Albanian ‘vengeful traditions’, but were related to post-war feelings of revenge. Lopes Cardozo et al.
(2000) conducted a survey among Kosovo Albanians following the Kosovo War, in which nearly 90 per cent
reported post-traumatic feelings of hatred toward Serbs; less than half reported strong feelings of revenge; and
more than one third stated that they would act on these feelings.
2 For example President of the Constitutional Court Arta Rama said this in her interview. Nevertheless she said
the campaign against blood feuds ‘created a feeling of community and of capacity at resolving important matters
outside of the institutions of the regime. Because people did not trust the institutions, they solved their own
problems through those reconciliations and other parallel institutions of government and justice. That was
empowering self-help that helped Kosovo to be a more effective community at crime control' (Interview 121519).
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Reconciling feuds; resisting oppression
In Communist Yugoslavia the Kanun was banned and suppressed, as it was in Communist Albania.
Yet it survived as a form of resistance. According to some commentators, the influence of the Kanun
increased after the fall of communism (Pratt 2013: 4). The Kanun was in part an institution for
reconciling feuds within Albanian society to unify resistance to Ottoman rule. At a number of notable
points in the centuries of resistance to ’the Turks’, there were concerted campaigns across the
northern Albanian lands to invoke the Kanun to reconcile all internal blood feuds before launching a
new surge of Albanian resistance. The last of these massive society-wide reconciliation campaigns
under Ottoman domination were in 1910 (10 April; 1 May), with earlier campaigns including 1878,
1703 and 1444 (Clark 2000: 64).
In 1990 a group of Albanian university students decided to revive this tradition. Distinguished scholar
of Albanian culture, Anton Çetta joined them to become the public face of their campaign, as did
many leaders of the Council for the Defense of Human Rights and Freedoms and scholars from the
Albanological Institute. It was initially called Action for Blood Feud Reconciliation. Approximately 500
activists criss-crossed Kosovo between 1990 and 1992 in a scaled-up reconciliation movement to end
blood feuds. The students visited house-to-house to persuade Albanians that if they were to unite
against the threat posed by Milosevic, they would have to resolve their own blood feuds first.
Estimates vary on the number of blood feuds reconciled in this campaign, with the Mangalakova
(2004) estimate for the International Centre for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations of 1200
often cited, though Clark (2001) estimated 2000 ceremonies of reconciliation completion, and Luci
(2014: 68, 101) 2000–2500. The campaign was expressed by one who attended as a contagion of
reconciliation: ‘Someone forgiving the blood turned into an act of others to follow’ (Prishtina interview
121525). This informant described Çetta’s method as looking for promising cases where reconciliation
could be achieved and then using those as virtuous examples to create a cascade of further
reconciliations.
The numbers in the last paragraph do not capture the magnitude of what happened here. They do not
count the number of people who attended each reconciliation. That number ranged from hundreds to
thousands for each final gathering. According to one informant who worked on the campaign, it was
common for there to be a considerable number of working meetings toward reconciliation that would
be attended by an average of 30 people. Then there would often be more than a thousand people,
dignitaries, food, dance and folkloric music at the final ritual of reconciliation. The largest was the
reconciliation gathering at Verrat e Llukës on 1 May 1990 where even the official Tanjung Agency
reported 100,000 participants, while Anton Çetta himself guessed 500,000 in the crowd (Clark 2000:
63). Parts of this event can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Braqs43CnmU.
Luci (2014:101) concludes ‘Over a period of two years, more than 500,000 people were said to or
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were documented to have taken part in mass organised meetings of reconciliation.’ There may not be
any other reconciliation or restorative justice process in recent decades that can claim this level of
mass participation, of the order of a third of the total population of a society in a short space of time.
The female students of the campaign joined hands with local women to evoke a limited but
meaningful feminist transformation of tradition through the campaign. As Luci (2014: 119) puts it:
In many ways, the reconciliation movement was characterised by the refashioning of
previous ‘male domains’ in the public sphere of homes, which required specific forms
of speech and narrative forms, into more inclusive spaces where women became
agents in a new, even though temporary, vision of resistance. Serbian nationalist
discourse and public imagery had constructed an idea of a backward Albanian
culture, a violent masculinity, and thus dominated femininity. Therefore, a politics of
culture emerged in Kosova, which sought not only to dispel such imaginings, but
foremost to show that Albanian cultural traditions could animate emancipatory politics
(Luci 2014: 246).
One Serbian NGO leader we interviewed in Mitrovica saw the campaign against blood feuds as part
of a positive nonviolent movement, but one from which he was excluded because he was a Serb:
Rugova, it was good that he was peaceful but he was always Albanian. He never
included Serbs living alongside Albanian society in his peaceful resistance movement.
I was against Milosevic but I never could have joined LDK because I was a Serb. It
was not a movement from multi-ethnic society. They wanted to build an Albanian
society. Roma and other groups were also not part of LDK or PDK. They never even
tried to include them ... With Albanian support the opposition to Milosevic could've got
rid of him by electoral and other means. But that was not the goal (Interview 121530).
Although one person we interviewed claimed that some members of the Serbian community
participated in the reconciliation processes of the early 1990s, other informants did not confirm this.
Taking into account the positive use of besa in maintaining friendly relations between Albanians and
Serbs in the past, the leaders of the nonviolent resistance might have used certain paragraphs from
the Kanun to invite members of the Serbian communities to join their nonviolent struggle against
Milosevic. One of the important Albanian traditions is giving social honour to their guests (miku). The
Kanun itself contains more than sixty paragraphs (§§ 602-66) regulating how guests should be treated
with honour, hospitality and protection from abuse and violence by third persons—even to the point of
risking one’s own life (§ 643). The most vivid example of how this tradition served to prevent violence
towards non-Albanian ‘guests’ was the way Albanians protected Jews from the Nazi-led Holocaust
during World War II (Sarner 1997; Weinstein 2000:97; Sadiku, 2014: 102).
After the war, the unifying motivation of resisting tyranny that was present in the campaign against
blood feuds during the 1990s was missing. It took years before NGOs became strong that made
blood feud reconciliation work a priority. The Committee for Nationwide Reconciliation, the Albanian
Foundation for Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation of Disputes, Partners Kosova and the Peace
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Missionaries Union have done important work in reconciling blood feuds but have not had the human
resources to tackle a growing backlog of unaddressed feuds. The post-war struggle for international
recognition of Kosovo’s independence hindered the use of the Kanun’s guest-friendly provisions for a
political narrative that would prevent violence against Serbs and their exodus from Kosovo.
Impacts of the campaign
No one would claim that blood feuds were eliminated to zero in the 1990s as a result of the campaign,
but most commentators believe most extant blood feuds were resolved. Some scholars even
comment that ‘virtually no blood feuds continued’ (Clark 2001: 2). As a result of the campaign against
blood feuds, it became an act of disloyalty against the resistance to pursue a blood feud against
fellow Albanians. Aggrieved families ‘pardoned the blood ... in the name of the youth, the people and
the flag’ (Clark 2001: 2; this language was often repeated in our interviews). For many of the youth,
this was also part of a more general move away from patriarchal traditions and toward becoming
modern Europeans, while at the same time embracing the reconciliatory traditions of the Kanun. This
changed cultural habits, perhaps even permanently to some degree.
With the end of the war in 1999, however, and the end of the patriotic obligation to avert blood feuds,
new feuds did spring up, including some caused by killing during the war and by testimony against
defendants in war crime trials. These surged back to a significant degree between 2000 and 2004,
though many of the murders of this period undoubtedly harnessed the blood feud narrative to what
was strategic political murder. Then murders pursuant to blood feuds almost certainly fell again in the
twelve years since 2004 once the initial surge of post-war revenge violence settled.
The Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms has reported data from the end of the
war until 2003 on about 40 murders related to blood feuds recorded in Kosovo (Mangalakova 2004:
11), though there were undoubtedly other unreported cases. Partners Kosova in our interview and in
other forums see the incidence of blood feuds as lower than this today. Before 1990 there is no
systematic recording of blood feud killings in Kosovo, though the New York Times quoted Pristina’s
Institute for Albanian Studies as estimating as many as 100 murders in single years during the 1980s
(Sudetic 1990). This seems an implausibly high claim to the Kosovar experts, statisticians and
scholars we interviewed. In 1989, the year before the campaign started, Clark (2000: 61) reports only
15 deaths from blood feuds. This is still a larger number than the average of 10 a year in the years
immediately after the war and a much larger number than has been reported for any single year
since.
Boyle (2014) characterises Kosovo more generally as a society that suffered a high level of strategic
violence in its first five years of ‘peace’. Strategic violence is defined as violence aimed at
transforming the balance of power and resources in a contested area. While Bosnia suffered a much
more deadly war than Kosovo, it was Kosovo that suffered the more deadly post-conflict strategic
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violence. Boyle (2014: Chapter 6) found Bosnia, with twice the population of Kosovo, to suffer only 42
cases of post-conflict strategic violence, while Kosovo had 213 in a comparable five-year period,
largely as a result of strategic attacks against Serb, Roma and other minority communities throughout
Kosovo. Mostly this amounted to threats of violence and burning of houses. Sometimes it was sniper
fire to terrify populations to flee. On 92 occasions, it included grenade attacks recorded by the UN and
27 other attacks with mortars or rocket-held grenades. There was also extensive factional violence
between rival Albanian groups. This persisted for longer. One former member of the KLA intelligence
organization, SHIK, Nazim Bllaca, has confessed to multiple murders himself and alleged that SHIK
killed 450 people in the decade after the war, mostly by 2004, mostly political opponents of PDK,
particularly members of LDK. Leaked reports of the EU’s rule of law mission, EULEX, and leaked
German intelligence reports, support the analysis that SHIK was responsible for a large PDK-directed
campaign of political assassinations and kidnappings against its opponents (Boyle 2014: Chapter 6).
While strategic political violence in Kosovo with 213 killings in the 5-year post-conflict period was
much worse than Bosnia, it was not as bad as Iraq (with 82,682), Rwanda (with 8,439) or East Timor
(with 322).
Moving beyond strategic political violence to the general level of violence, Boyle 2014: Table 6.3)
compared the level of violent crime in the first year after the war with Northern Ireland, which also
terminated its conflict at the end of the 1990s and has a slightly higher population than Kosovo.
Kosovo had 245 murders in 2000, while Northern Ireland had only 44. On the positive side Kosovo
had half the recorded rapes (115) of Northern Ireland (232) though in both jurisdictions there was
hesitation of women to report rape cases.
There are many structural reasons why criminologists would predict a high homicide rate in Kosovo. It
is a society in which a patriarchal honour code is still part of the habitus of the people (Färnsveden et
al 2014: 16) a characteristic of many of the societies with the highest homicide rates, particularly Latin
American societies such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Venezuela and Colombia. This
characteristic of these societies, in turn, helps sustain a formidable male gang and organised crime
culture which can stake a competitive advantage in trafficking in drugs, humans or guns. In the case
of Kosovo, organised crime grew after the mass dismissal of Albanians from the legitimate economy
in 1989, causing many to turn to the illegitimate economy and the violence so often associated with it.
Two decades later, UNMIK in 2008 estimated the share of entrenched organised crime in Kosovo’s
economy at between 15 and 20 per cent (Proksik 2013: 284). In 2004, UNMIK estimated that 80 per
cent of the heroin destined for Western European markets passed through Kosovo or Macedonia.
UNODC estimated a value of profits from heroin sales though the region as many times the value of
the entire Kosovo state budget (Proksik 2013: 284). The International Organization for Migration
(IOM) estimated that approximately 200,000 women annually in this period were stripped of their
identity papers and bought and sold by Balkan sex cartels and their extensions (Giatzidis 2007: 328).
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Kosovo is a post-war society; participation in a war increases post-war homicide (Archer and Gartner
1984; Ghobarah et al 2003). After its peace agreement was signed in the 1990s, the homicide rate in
El Salvador spiked to 135 per 100,000, a huge contrast to Kosovo’s single digit rate. More people
were being killed by homicide after El Salvador’s successful peace agreement was signed than were
being killed during the worst years of its war (Geneva Declaration 2011: Chapter 2). El Salvador is not
exceptional as a case where the extent of killing increases after a peace agreement ends a war. We
have seen this with Iraq (Boyle 2014: Chapter 8) and a number of African and other wars (Duffield
2001: 188). Widespread disruption of settled institutions by refugee flows contributes to post-war
violence (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2017: Chapter 3) and Kosovo had a much larger scale of refugee
suffering compared to countries that suffered bigger, longer wars. By 2000, 90 per cent of the
population of Kosovo had been driven from their homes, the majority of them being Albanians
(Naimark 2002: 182) who were driven out first, followed by Serbs (and Roma) in a reverse cleansing.
Kosovo inherited a gun culture that was worsened by an avalanche of weapons flowing in from
Albania during the war. 65% of households continued to own at least one firearm after years of UN
and EU effort to destroy weapons (Pozhidaev and Andzhelich 2005: 63). Kosovo is a post-Communist
society and such societies tended to suffer steep increases in homicide after the collapse of
Communism (Karstedt 2006). ‘The fall of the communist regimes prompted the virtual collapse of the
states’ control functions’ (Giatzidis 2007: 328), especially so in Kosovo after 1989 when Kosovo
Albanians withdrew all cooperation with what limited state functionality was left. Karstedt (2006: 55)
concludes that increased homicide rates following transitions to democracy are not usually short-term
results of disruption from the demise of an autocracy, but involve anomic tendencies that persist
through quite a long duration of transition. We saw extremely elevated homicide rates for many years
in most post-communist transitions, and in South Africa, for example. Karstedt (2006:64) argues that
the data show that ‘when the grip of an authoritarian regime loosens, the anomic tendencies produced
during the preceding period of autocracy erupt in violent conflicts and a wave of violent crime’.
Kosovo has a youth bulge, a forty per cent unemployment rate and is the poorest society with
possibly still the weakest state in Europe. There can be no dispute that it started this century as the
weakest state in Europe because in 2000 it had no well-established state institutions. All the factors
discussed in the last three paragraphs mean that in a counterfactual analysis (see references above),
Kosovo is a most likely case (Eckstein 1975) for a high homicide rate. The grip of corruption,
organised crime that implemented a widespread assassination policy against its enemies, outlier
levels of drug and other trafficking, extremely high gun ownership, the honour culture, revenge
culture, in a post-war, post-authoritarian society with a weak state, 90 per cent of the population
refugees, a youth bulge and 40 per cent of the population unemployed all would lead us to expect an
above average homicide rate in post-war Kosovo. In the next section, however, we ponder a Kosovo
homicide rate in recent years at one third the world average homicide rate per 100,000 adults (6.2
according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime). Counterfactual analysts are attracted to
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cases like these to move from quantitative analysis to a qualitative search for particular historical
conjunctures associated in changes to homicide patterns. This is the analysis undertaken in the next
section.
Historical trends in Kosovo homicide rates
Data sources
Homicide rates herein are based on data on intentional homicides collected from: (1) Official Country
Statistics (1953–2013); (2) Ismet Salihu’s Dissertation (1957–77); (3) Kosovo Police (1999–2013); (4)
UNMIK Police (2000–05); (5) UNODC and World Bank (2008–13). As presented in Figure 1, there are
discrepancies between different sources due to different data collection methods; however, they
converge on a common pattern.3 Our research also delved qualitatively into the data, for example
through interviews with Sanije Uka from the Agency of Statistics in Kosovo who has remained behind
the data presented here since 1990 (sources 1 and 3) and Professor Ismet Salihu (source 2).
Salihu’s qualitative work revealed many cases in the last century where the Serbian police had not
reported correctly, for example by substituting homicide with suicide on many occasions. This critical
qualitative individualisation of the data gives reason for suspecting an even sharper comparative
reduction in the homicide rate since the Kosovo war compared to the period of Serbian domination of
the justice system. Professor Salihu’s qualitative analysis of cases from different courts in Kosovo
importantly concludes that the most common cause (21% of intentional homicides) in former
Yugoslavia was vengeance, as would be predicted in a culture with an honour code.
Official Country Statistics cover the longest period measuring homicides in Kosovo. They are based
on data collected by civil registry offices, usually based on death certificates issued by physicians,4
and reported in the Official Country Statistics since 1953. Due to historical changes of the status of
Kosovo, three different states collected the data throughout the six decades: (1) Yugoslavia 1953–90
(SAP Kosovo 1976: 44; 1981: 47; 1985: 41; 1989: 41; SR Jugoslavija 1992: 90, 229), Serbia 1991–97
(Republički zavod za statistiku Srbije 2007:142), and Kosovo 2002–13 (Republika e Kosovës 2015:
62). The 4-year disruption in the data (1998–2001) is due to the Kosovo War and its aftermath. Dotted
lines are used to project homicide rates in the period of data disruption, knowing that the homicide
3 We excluded the data on homicide in Kosovo presented in latest edition of the European Sourcebook of Crime
and Criminal Justice Statistics (Aebi et al. 2014: 34) due to serious doubts about their accuracy. The rates of
intentional homicides in Kosovo according the Sourcebook ranged from 10.5 in 2007 to 14.5 in 2011, which
substantially differs from the Official Country Statistics (provided by the Kosovo Agency of Statistics) and from the
data provided by the UNODC.
4 In other cases, the information about the cause of death can be provided by the family of the deceased as
revealed in a court decision (in case of a missing person) or based on a police report (e.g., when a missing
person’s corpse was found).
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increased very sharply in the course of the war and post-war violence, as is also demonstrated by the
Kosovo Police data.
Salihu (1982) used several sources combined to measure homicides in Kosovo: statistical reports
(Vjetari Statistikor i KSA të Kosovës 1978: 30), Salihu’s own inquiry into court files on homicides that
took place in the period 1966–75 (Salihu 1982: 125), reports from public prosecutors and police (e.g.
Pokrajinski sekretarijat za unutrašnje poslove 1969), as well as data cited in the literature (e.g.
Marković 1978).
The Kosovo Police data for the period between 1999 and 2013 were obtained directly from the
Information Office of Kosovo Police in March 2016. UNMIK Police Data for the period between 2000
and 2005 was reported in a survey published by the South Eastern and Eastern Europe
Clearinghouse for the Control of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SEESAC 2006).
The most recent UNODC (2016) 5 and World Bank (2016) data on homicides for the period 2008–13
correspond to those reported by EUROSTAT (2016), however EUROSTAT’s homicide rates are lower
due to the discrepancy in the population estimates for Kosovo.6 The fact that there has not been an
accurate population census in Kosovo for decades poses a particular problem in determining
homicide rates. Albanians and Serbs boycotted the last two censuses in 1991 and 2011 respectively.
All estimations encounter difficulties in determining how and when migrations that resulted from the
Kosovo War and its aftermath affected the country’s population, which led to lack of accuracy in those
estimations. For example, some official statistical reports claim that Kosovo’s population never
exceeded 2 million (Raporti i Zhvillimit Njerëzor në Kosovë 2014: 23).7 Official estimations, however,
by the Serbian authorities as well as the World Bank (2016), claim that the population of Kosovo
exceeded 2 million at some point during the 1990s.8 A report prepared by Blayo et al. (2000: 153) for
5 The latest UNODC data do not accord with a previously published study which measured lower homicide rates
in Kosovo – e.g. 4.4 in 2008, 3.2 in 2009, and 3.6 in 2010 (UNODC 2013: 131).
6 The greatest discrepancy was in the period until 2010, when the discrepancy reached almost half a million. For
that year EUROSTAT (2016) reports Kosovo had 2.21 million inhabitants, while the World Bank (2016) reports
1.78 million.
7 Even one of the official statistics acknowledges this (Raporti i Zhvillimit Njerëzor në Kosovë 2014: 24).
8 It is hard to dispute this, bearing in mind the 1981 census count of 1.5 million, the official estimation based on
the partially boycotted 1991 census counting 1.9 million and the population growth rate. Some sources claim that
the Kosovo population exceeded 2 million even in the 2000s. According to EUROSTAT (2016), the major change
in the Kosovo population took place in 2010–1 when it measured a population decrease of nearly half a million:
2,208,107 in 2010, 1,794,180 in 2011. Since there is no evidence that supports such a dramatic population
decrease at that time, we can consider it delayed acknowledgement of a population drop based on the 2011
population census. Sanije Uka who is in charge of gathering the homicide data from civil registries for the Kosovo
Agency of Statistics told us that, according to the data available to him, even in 2011 Kosovo had more than 2
million people. We could not find any reports that support this estimation.
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the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and IOM confirms this—estimating that the total
population of Kosovo in 1999 would have been 2,311,000 persons, if between 611,000 and 911,000
persons had not been absent on the date of the survey. In the post-war period most of the Albanian
refugees returned to Kosovo; however, at the same time a substantial part of the Serbian population
was displaced to Serbia.9 Thus, it would be difficult to dispute the fact that the major population drop
occurred in the course of the Kosovo War and its aftermath.
Due to these considerations, we had to combine two sources of data that reflect such population
trends. As the source of the estimated Kosovo population until 1997 we used the Official Country
Statistics (SR Jugoslavija 1992: 27; Republički zavod za statistiku Srbije 2007: 36). For the
subsequent period, we could not rely on the Official Country Statistics due to significant gaps and
discrepancies in the data, but for the period between 1998 and 2013 we relied on the estimations
reported by the World Bank (2016), whose estimations had been compatible with the Official Country
Statistics in the previous periods.
The homicide patterns
Historians of Kosovo identify the 25-year history of nonviolent struggle against Belgrade’s domination
as starting in 1981. Even though there was an important eruption of resistance in 1968, sustained,
resilient resistance did not start until 1981. Figure 1 shows that while the first year of the concerted
campaign of nonviolent resistance, 1981, was a year of comparatively high homicide rates, that rate
fell sharply10 and then gradually to be at extremely low levels during the 15 years of nonviolent
resistance (up to 1996). Then homicide spiked to very high levels during the armed struggle, but also
experienced the largest homicide drop in the aftermath of the Kosovo War. The drop has been
described as the steepest decline in homicide in Kosovo’s history (Alvazzi del Frate & Mugellini 2012:
145). The homicide levels remained moderately high, however, in the years of strategic violence
immediately post-conflict (up to 2004). The picture is of gradual decline since then to the point where
by 2013 Kosovo had become a low-homicide society with the rate falling to 2 per 100,000 inhabitants,
one-third of the world average of 6.2, yet still twice the homicide rate that averaged less than 1 before
the conflict, between 1984 and 1996. In 2014 the homicide rate seems likely to have fallen further.
Our sources within Kosovo Police state that the number of murders in Kosovo in 2014 was 35 cases,
whereas in 2015 this number has dropped to 25 (a 29% further fall).
The final important point to note is that during the long period of very low homicide during the
nonviolence era, the stepping up of the nonviolence campaign between 1990 and 1992 through the
campaign against blood feuds knocks the homicide rate sharply lower still during those three years,
9 According to UNHCR (2016), Serbia (including Kosovo) still has 220,227 internally displaced persons, most of
whom are Serbs from Kosovo.
10 Professor Salihu’s more qualitative analysis reached the same conclusion for the 1980s fall.
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when it is closer to zero than to 1. Indeed it remains so until the war begins. After 1996 homicide
escalates sharply until it reaches levels that can no longer be counted in a meaningful way, though
the Kosovo police counts peak at 15 per 100,000. We presume this count excludes huge numbers of
murders by the police themselves and large numbers of murders classified as suicides or accidents.
Most state and KLA assassinations of people were not counted until the UN administration arrived.
<INSERT FIGURE 1 HERE>
The Kosovo peacebuilding literature is consistent with the international literature in generating a great
deal of qualitative evidence of outbreaks of domestic violence after the war in Kosovo (Farnsworth
2008: 21), though systematic comparative survey research evidence is absent for Kosovo.
While the cross-national evidence is clear that wars increase national homicide rates post-conflict, it is
equally clear that wars elevate suicide rates post-conflict (Ghoborah et al 2003). In addition, we know
that certain societies with exceptionally low homicide rates also have suicide rates ten to twenty times
higher than their homicide rate —leading instances of this exceptionalism being Japan, Korea,
Slovenia and Slovakia (comparisons based on UNODC homicide data and WHO suicide data). This
has given birth to a longstanding Durkheimian criminological literature on whether the control of
violence in low homicide rate societies can be displaced into high suicide rates (Henry and Short
1954). Our purpose here is not to engage with that literature, nor to contribute to resolving those
debates. It simply seems important in a post-war analysis to check out the possibility that unusually
low homicide rates in Kosovo are not displaced into massive internalization of violence as self-harm.
Figure 2 shows this is not the case. In comparative terms, the impact of the Kosovo war on post-war
suicide rates is extremely slight. Kosovo has become a low-homicide, low-suicide society. Of great
interest is the fact that Kosovo has an exceptionally low suicide rate during the years of the nonviolent
resistance up to 1996. Moreover, the 1990-2 campaign against blood feuds does not displace
homicide to suicide. On the contrary, 1991-3 have the lowest recorded suicide rates in modern
Kosovo history. Sometimes administrations wilfully conceal the truth or negligently record suicides or
homicides as accidental deaths. Figure 2 shows that these also plunge to their historic low during the
campaign against blood feuds and fall quite sharply during most of the years of nonviolent resistance.
The massive magnitude of the decline in accidental deaths in 1991 has caused commentators to
query whether blood feud deaths had been hiding inside the accidental death statistics until the
campaign against blood feud brought them to an end, even if only temporarily.
<INSERT FIGURE 2 HERE>
To conclude our analysis, then, the data suggest six conclusions:
1. Kosovo is a case where violent death declines after war, in sharp contrast to the common
scenario of intentional killing and suicide increases after a peace agreement is signed;
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2. The decades of nonviolent resistance are associated with a large reduction in violent death;
3. The campaign against blood feuds was a restorative element of the nonviolence campaign
that was associated with a particularly sharp reduction in violent death within the nonviolence
period;
4. Kosovo is a unique example of a massive reconciliation process with participation of nearly
one third of the total population in a short space of time.
5. The ethnographic evidence as well as quantitative evidence converge on the likelihood that
the campaign against blood feuds sharply reduced blood feud murders during the early 1990s
and that blood feud murders have never returned to the levels that prevailed before 1990.
6. In summary then, while the various components of the nonviolent campaign against the
Milosevic regime failed to prevent war, they did almost certainly prevent violence in a
historically transformative way. This in a post-authoritarian, post-war society that suffered
much higher immediate post-conflict strategic assassination than in other recent European
conflicts such as Bosnia and Northern Ireland and in one of the worst examples of post-war
capture of state and society by a murderous organised crime network.
Kosovo is a case study of applying the criminological lens to struggles against tyranny. Looking
through a criminological lens, we evaluate nonviolent campaigns of resistance not only according to
whether they prevent war. Rather, the criminologist evaluates them according to whether they reduce
violent death, where war death is just one form of intentional killing. On the war-prevention test,
nonviolent resistance in Kosovo failed. On the criminological test, it succeeded.
Beyond the NATO bombing narrative
Scholars from NATO countries tend to buy the narrative that the prolonged NATO bombing of Serbia
was a necessary evil. Scholarly debates about the various NATO bombing campaigns mainly focus
on whether they were a breach of international law. Were they justified crimes of aggression? This of
course was not the debate in non-NATO countries, particularly China. It saw the loss of life when its
embassy in Belgrade was bombed as a crime of aggression by NATO. In this section, we use our
field research in Kosovo to make the point that, viewed through the wider criminological lens we have
adopted, the NATO bombing as necessary evil appears a myopic analysis.
Revisionist narrative 1: Had NATO supported Kosovar nonviolence, it might have succeeded
The negotiators at Dayton excluded Rugova and his team because their struggle was not deploying
violence to unsettle stability. As a result, the people of Kosovo turned against Rugova’s strategy.
When the KLA transformed the resistance into an armed struggle, the west took notice. Indeed the
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west saw an opportunity to remove and indict Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo. Western diplomacy
underwrote KLA violence; it punished the patient nonviolence of the mass of Kosovo Albanians. The
US provided cash to the KLA and training in violence, instead of providing training in more effective
techniques of nonviolent resistance. Worse still, western diplomacy punished most the more effective
forms of nonviolence. Our theory would be that in these ways, western policy created a moral hazard
of armed violence. This means that the hazard of violence is increased because there are
international rewards for opting for violence and international punishments for opting for nonviolent
resistance. Western diplomacy shunned the proactive nonviolence of the students and the miners that
was succeeding in inflicting real costs on the regime and was succeeding in discouraging Serbs from
following the pressure from Milosevic’s regime to settle in Kosovo.
Kosovo’s nonviolence met many of Chenoweth and Stephan’s (2011) conditions for the success of
nonviolent resistance, particularly in mass participation, Albanian defection from the security services,
and in sheer creativity and energy. It can be argued that had the west supported that nonviolence
instead of threatening withdrawal of western support as soon as the nonviolent campaign got
sufficiently robust to impose political costs on Milosevic, nonviolent resistance may have succeeded
politically during the mid-1990s in both Kosovo and Belgrade.
Revisionist narrative 2: Reducing violence is the ultimate aim of nonviolence, not preventing
war; Kosovo succeeded in reducing violence
In spite of the timidity of western support, nonviolence did succeed in achieving the ultimate aim of
nonviolent strategy—resisting domination by means that reduce the amount of violence in the world.
This even though it failed to avert war. Reviving Albanian reconciliation skills and traditions not only
opened the door to more peaceful and effective conflict resolution in the long term; in the short term
(by 1992) it ended at least 1200 deadly blood feuds each of which risked multiple murders. A
theoretical account of how this was accomplished is embedded in the customary justice theory of
reconciliation in the Kanun, and in restorative justice theory (Braithwaite 2002). In the long run history
of almost every society during the past half century, homicide kills many more people than war and
terrorism. A limitation of the nonviolence literature is that it puts all the emphasis on preventing,
healing and ending war to the neglect of the commonly recurrent forms of violence such as gender
based violence, male revenge violence, and strategic post-conflict violence (Boyle 2014) which are at
the same time associated with war and independent of it. Restorative justice theory does not commit
that theoretical error (Braithwaite 2002), and recently that has become true of wider criminology
informed by a criminology of war developed, among others, by leading figures of the discipline (Rafter
2016; Walklate and MacGarry 2015; Hagan et al 2015; Karstedt 2012).
A balanced narrative: The mixed legacy of reconciliation and forgiveness in Kosovo and
Serbia.
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While our limited data triangulates on efficacy, we cannot be certain about whether there were long-
term benefits of the campaign against blood feuds as one key plank of civil resistance in Kosovo. The
qualitative data allows us to be rather certain that there were large short-term benefits. And we can be
certain that the dominant western narrative that NATO bombing did all the decisive work of ending
violence in Kosovo is false.
A balanced narrative is clear about the short-term benefits of nonviolent resistance in immediately
reducing violence associated with blood feuds and in building mass social solidarity to resist tyranny
on a wide front. It also sees some profound tactical errors in Rugova’s nonviolent strategy. In the
aftermath of the errors of domestic and international leaders, the rise of the KLA and the NATO
bombing did play the critical final role in ending the Milosevic regime’s domination of Kosovo in the
bloody finale of this historical drama. In the aftermath of the Kosovo war, the preventive UN
peacekeeping deployment and negotiated peace in Macedonia points, however, to a better path that
might have been taken in Kosovo, in Bosnia, in Croatia had they only been taken early enough
(Braithwaite and D’Costa 2017: Part I).
Future research
Our analysis is sufficient to show that a good hypothesis is that the extraordinary breadth of the
engagement of Kosovo civil society with nonviolence between 1968 and 1996, especially between
1981 and 1996, and more especially between 1990 and 1992, helped leave a legacy of a
comparatively low violence post-conflict society. On the other hand, war did cascade to terrible
corruption, organised crime and violence associated with this in Kosovo, as it did throughout the
former Yugoslavia. This is the topic of another paper (Marsavelski and Braithwaite 2016).
An interim test of the impact of nonviolent resistance on violence cross-nationally will be possible at
the completion of the Peacebuilding Compared data collection of which this research is a part. A
number of variables about the character and strength of nonviolent resistance in countries that have
experienced wars are being coded. This will permit assessment of whether our qualitative conclusion
that civil resistance in Kosovo did make a contribution to non-war violence reduction has wider
relevance across more than 50 wars since 1990. 37 wars beyond Kosovo have preliminary coding so
far. Quantitatively, we will be able to test whether post-war homicide rates are lower when there is a
history of vibrant nonviolent resistance. Qualitatively, we will be able to explore a diversity of cases for
differences and similarities with Kosovo. That analysis should not be seen as having an n of a meager
50 national cases. This case study shows that within one country case there can be many degrees of
freedom from multiple historical turning points to armed conflict and to nonviolence, and many villages
across space that move from being a village afflicted by blood feuds to a reconciled village. We hope
this article shows why this is comparative macrocriminological research that matters.
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Figures
Figure 1: Homicide rates in Kosovo in the period between 1953 and 2013.
Figure 2: Rates of intentional homicides, accidental deaths and suicides in Kosovo
in the period between 1953 and 2013.
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